by Hugh Howey
The ensuing flight back had been a deathly silent affair, the smells of rotted flowers and dirty dishes wafting through the confined space. Walter spent the time dizzy with the wrongness of his punishment. He had given his uncle power beyond the wildest hopes of his schemings, and the reward had been practically a demotion from the true rank he’d honestly earned. That, plus a year of being grounded. Not to mention a year of hearing it from Pewder, and of now never being able to outrank him in seniority, even when he eventually took over the clan—!
Thoughts like that were too much to take. Walter practically vibrated from holding it all in.
Their new pilot set the ship down in the spaceport, and Walter was the first out the ramp. He ran across the tarmac and through the market, bumping off busy shoppers as he went. He ran out into the streets, the pavement still shimmering from the passing floods, the gutters gurgling the last inches of water down their drains. He skipped over the crumbling bridges and through the crowded sidewalks, churning his legs for home. He had one last chance to make things right, to get the rewards he deserved for bringing all of Palan’s pirate clans to their knees while lifting Hommul above the rest. His mother, surely, would understand what he’d done and duly lavish him.
He ran past the Regal Hotel, disgorging its lobby of low-lifers, then around the corner and into his alley. Walter wheezed as he clomped up the steps to his door. His picks shook in his hands while he tried to unlock the deadbolt.
“Momma, I’m home!”
He yelled the greeting through the stubborn slab of wood. Tears of frustration were already welling in his eyes as he secured the first tumbler.
“I’m back from promotions, Momma!”
Walter still wasn’t sure how he was going to break the news that he hadn’t been promoted. The next tumbler succumbed to his frustrated machinations. Walter bit his lip and concentrated on the third and fourth, his damned hands shaking like a Junior Pirate’s.
Finally, the lock clicked open. Walter threw his picks in his pocket without bothering to arrange them back in their case. He shoved the door open and rushed straight for her bed, not noticing how quiet the machines were as he weaved around them to get there.
“Momma,” he gasped, wiping his nose and plopping down on the foot of the bed. “You’ve gotta do something about Uncle. You’ve gotta talk to him. The Hommul Clan is—”
Walter reached for his mother’s hand, but stopped himself just before grabbing it.
“Momma?”
The plastic bubble of a mask stood over her nose and mouth, its surface dry and clear, not fogged with her breath as it normally was. Walter could see the dull shimmer of her slightly parted lips through the clear shell.
“Mom?”
He shook her knee. His mother’s body felt like part of the furniture: still and lifeless, absorbing his movement and dissipating it to nothing. His mind, already stunned by the day’s disappointments, could not wrap itself around the obvious.
“Momma, wake up, I need to talk to you.”
Walter slid up the bed and wrapped both hands around one of hers, holding the wires and tubes along with her fingers. So much of the apparatus had become a part of her, anyway.
“No,” he said. He shook his head and patted the back of her hand. “Momma, wake up.”
He turned to the machines around her. One or two were still running, monitoring the awful. Walter could’ve read their screens and graphs at any other time, but right then, the silence was deafening. His head thrummed with the lack of whirring; it roared with the absence of kicking tubes and fan-compressed air. There was a whole lot of nothing going on in the room. The machines that kept his mother alive had all gone dead.
Dead.
It was the first time his brain nudged up against the concept. He pushed away from the bed and stomped toward the breathing machine. The screen showed an auto-shutdown procedure, responding to an input from the pulse monitor. It wasn’t Walter’s prior nemesis that had let him down—it had been another machine.
Walter turned to the pumps that kept his mother’s lungs dry. That machine was also calling out at him with its silence. Its screen showed an error message, an indecipherable code of digits and letters that might mean something to whoever possessed the manual. Walter spun around to the back of the unit, his multi-tool materializing in his hand. He fumbled for the screws, his mind spinning.
“Hold on, Momma,” he said. “Hold on.”
Tears coursed down his face, obscuring his vision. He dug and gouged at the screws, working them loose in fits and starts.
“We’re gonna get those lungs dry,” he told his mom. “Don’t you worry. You just hang in there.”
He ripped the panel free once the last screw was loose. Walter threw it out of his way, sending it clanging and skidding across the cracked tile floor. The stench of electrical fire, of charred silicon chips, wafted out of the machine. Walter shined his light into the bowels of the pump unit, scanning the miss-mash of cobbled gear, antique spares, hasty wiring, and deep scratches haloed with rust. He sniffed hard, tracking the odor to the offending part, when his cone of light caught a tiny gray wisp of coiled smoke rising up from an electrical board.
Walter stuck his head in and turned to the side so he could get a good look at the board.
It obviously didn’t belong.
The board was affixed in place with ugly gobs of yellowed and aged glue. In fact, the board wasn’t even being used for its original function. It was a piece-board, something Palans did when they wanted to use individual components on a PCB board without taking the time to remove the pieces. A tangled web of colored wires were soldered to the board here and there, hijacking the use of a resistor or a capacitor, three wires soldered to what looked like a timing chip. Walter felt a wave of relief as he realized he could just replace the components with spares ripped out of one of the other monitoring machines.
“You hang in there,” he told his long-dead mother. He reached in and pushed the wires to one side so he could see which unit would need which transistor or rheostat. He bathed the board in the full glare of his light, memorizing the location of each component—
And that’s when he saw for the first time just what he was looking at.
The board.
He was seeing it straight-on, all the chips arranged just so.
And he’d seen it before. He’d seen it in a schematic, laid out so pretty and clean. It was just the sort of Navy hardware that made for a perfect piece-board. Just the sort of top-secret, unhackable device one could only use for a spare part, a resistor or two.
Walter gazed at the barest whiff of smoke rising up from the fried unit. He watched it spiral its way out of his cone of light, up into the darkness of the machine’s innards.
The hyperdrive board sitting before him was dead. It was as dead as the hyperdrive boards in all the other ships in the Palan system. It was as dead as his mother.
And Walter had killed it.
39 · Felony Falls Penitentiary
One of the wheels of his food cart spun with a mind of its own. It would rise from the uneven floor of the prison hallway and do a spastic dance. It would make contact once more, jittering the cart sideways. Then it would squeal out, jump back in the air, and do it all over again.
Walter watched the unbalanced wheel go through this routine. He kept his head bowed, the weight of his shoulders supported mostly by the other three wheels as he pushed the cart along. He followed the crazy wheel’s rise and plummet, its howling complaint, its inability to do what the other wheels did, and he wondered—as if the wheel had a mind of its own—why it bothered.
On top of the cart, tin cans sloshed water dangerously up their sides. Other cans of brown food pellets rattled as the unappetizing nuggets did their little dance, jiggling themselves deep into their brethren while other pellets jostled up to take their place. Walter scrutinized this interplay for a while, imagining each pellet like a pirate clan enjoying its brief stay up top before it was swallowed
by the rest. He thought about how long that ordeal had persisted, probably as far back as his people had grown legs and crawled out of the muck.
Walter shook his head and sighed aloud. None of the metaphors were apt any longer. He had seen to that. Palan was in chaos. The loss of pretty much every ship in the system was nothing compared to the clan heads that had gone missing along with them. The pilot of their own ship had been right: None of them were heard from. They didn’t show up at Earth. They were just gone.
And now Junior Pirates were trying to be Senior Pirates. Outcasts were muscling back into old clans. And the coming of a second flood so soon after the last had been seen as an omen of sorts, a harbinger of more turbulent years ahead. Already, the meteorologists and armchair prognosticators were saying many more floods were on their way. What had been a slow year was now forecasted to be one of the most severe in centuries. They said it was a thousand year cycle, but Walter knew better. All it had been was a hack with the best of intentions. A program that had come with unintended consequences.
But unintended consequences were just a fact of life, Walter thought.
He let out another sigh and watched the kernels of food jostle, all of them going in circles.
The wheel of his cart set down and screamed, then rose back up, spinning idly and silently, if only for a moment.
Walter pushed his cart.
He had new prisoners to feed.
He figured he always would.
Part XXIII – The Bern Affair
“Nothing ends up where it began, for it cannot survive its journey unchanged.”
~The Bern Seer~
40 · Near Darrin · The Present
On the fringes of the Darrin system, an unlikely fleet formed and found its footing. Manned by Navy personnel long in the tooth and short on combat experience, and Callite refugees with little time as even shuttle passengers, they came together and tested their systems in a rising cloud of confidence. They had already done something previously thought impossible: They had pulled off a raid on the most feared system in the galaxy and had walked away with a fortune in hardware.
And now, what the new fleet lacked in numbers—counting less than fifty craft total—they almost made up for in raw power. The arms and defenses in each of the ships had evolved in a system famous for warfare. A system that had reduced entire planets to rubble.
Inside one of these ships, Edison put the finishing touches on the last of the hyperdrives, giving it one-time powers similar to Parsona’s. He surveyed the changes a final time, screwed the side panel tight using an index claw shaped like a Philips head, and then left the engine room, waving good luck to the ship’s crew as he stepped through the airlock and returned to Lady Liberty.
••••
Once Edison was aboard, Anlyn waited for the hatch indicators to show a good seal and then decoupled from their last ship. As she peeled away, she felt an immense pride in him for modding two more of the drives than any of the other engineers. His extra efforts had helped keep the Darrin fleet on schedule.
Overall, Anlyn was more than satisfied with how well the plan was unfolding. Even counting the loss of two full raid crews, the mission to steal and assemble such an advanced fleet had gone surprisingly well. She spun Lady Liberty around to face the staging area where pilots were putting their new ships through their paces. Several groups were engaging in weapons-lock dogfights with other ships in their wing, getting used to how the craft handled and how many Gs the crews could take in their ill-fitting flightsuits.
Anlyn watched as a few laser bolts were shot off into the distance. She had given them permission to test fire the cannons, but had told them not to waste rockets. Meanwhile, navigators contented themselves with dialing through menu after submenu, memorizing the location of defensive routines and practicing with locking onto neighboring ships on SADAR. This also helped the other crews get used to the sounds of their new warning alarms so they wouldn’t startle as easily in real combat.
Anlyn kept Lady Liberty above the action and watched. She saw a few good things within the maneuvers, but much wrong. The three real Firehawk pilots Molly had rescued from the Carrier stood out immediately as being head and shoulders above the rest. Each had been given command of one of the other three wings, and two of the pilots rode with their natural navigators. Saunders had argued the crews be split up, spreading their experience between two of the other ships, but Molly had insisted they remain together. She had assured them that the strength of an old partnership was more than double the advantage of each person on their own, and the way she had said it prevented any serious debate from taking place.
Now, Anlyn could tell from the mock engagements that Molly had been right. Those two intact and well-trained crews were dominating in their sparring matches, and were already helping the others improve their own abilities. Anlyn watched for a moment, then thumbed her radio. “Wing Three Beta, you’re inverting your dive like you’re in atmosphere. Just spin in place and fire.”
“Copy,” the pilot radioed back, his voice strained from the Gs.
Anlyn watched the maneuvers continue, offering advice where it was needed. Now and then, she glanced at the clock on her dash, which was counting down the moment to the real raid. Soon they would be jumping straight back to Lok and beginning their clash with the Bern fleet.
She could hardly believe what was set to happen next. As Edison settled in the nav seat and began going through the systems checks, she thought about what she was about to do. Anlyn Hooo, young princess, former slave, rogue pilot. She was about to lead a ragtag group of the aged and infirmed against the very fleet that had nearly brought all their demises and had literally downed loved ones among both the Callites and Humans. She was about to go up against the true enemy of her empire, the shadowy figures of her childhood nightmares, the subjects of so much prophecy, hand-wringing, and empty pronouncements, and she was in charge.
The ridiculousness of it all made it seem as if it couldn’t take place, as if something must stand in the way to prevent that moment from arriving. Even as the clock on the dash ticked down to the final hour, Anlyn felt almost sure it would happen to someone else, or in a different lifetime.
Then she thought about that massive Bern ship up in orbit around Lok, the one Molly told her had taken out an entire Human fleet. She knew that if Parsona and her crew didn’t have that gravity machine taken care of before they arrived, then none of her worries, none of her pointers to the other pilots, none of it would matter in the least.
Anlyn wondered if perhaps that ship was the thing keeping all her dreams from feeling real.
••••
Cat prepared herself for the jump into orbit while Scottie and Ryn arranged the hyperdrive platform in Parsona’s cargo bay. She sorted through the four remaining buckblades, looking for the one with the most solid craftsmanship. Ryke, meanwhile, continued to try and talk her out of going.
“It’s suicide,” he told her for the countless time.
Cat smiled to herself. The grizzly old scientist had resorted to repeating an experiment while hoping for a different result. It was a sign of how much he must care for her that his brain had stopped functioning properly. She powered on the buckblade, plucked one of her blond hairs out of her ponytail, then swiped the invisible weapon sideways through the dangling strand. The bottom half of the follicle fell away, and the barest tinge of something burnt drifted up to her Callite nose. She powered off the blade and hung it from her belt.
“Look—” She turned to Ryke and placed both hands on his low, broad shoulders. “It isn’t suicide, so stop thinking of it like that. Hell, if everything goes to shit like I suspect, that fleet up there might be the safest place in the universe. And you know me, I’ll switch sides in a heartbeat if I have to.”
Ryke frowned, his lower lip disappearing into his beard.
“I’m only kidding,” Cat said.
She squeezed his shoulder and looked around the cargo bay for anything she may ha
ve forgotten. She had a little food and water, a pair of good boots, a radio, and a buckblade. She couldn’t think of anything else.
“We’re all set up,” Scottie told her.
Cat walked over to Scottie and Ryn. She reached out her hand to shake Scottie’s, but he just used the grip to pull her into an embrace. She reciprocated, foreign emotions swelling in her throat, making it impossible to swallow.
“You be careful, Cat.”
“I will,” she mumbled into his shoulder.
Ryn hugged her next, his powerful Callite hands slapping fondly at her back.
“Don’t hesitate to send up those missiles,” she told the boys. “Don’t you think on me and Molly—you worry about that fleet coming back from Darrin.”
“We won’t let you down,” Scottie said.
Cat pulled out of the hug and waved the boys back. She stepped onto the jump platform and sat down in the ready position, her arms wrapped around her chest, her legs pulled up in front of her. She looked up to Ryke to let him know she was ready and caught him wiping at his eyes. The tears that had snuck by glistened in his beard.
“Let’s do it,” she told him.
He shook his head sadly, but stepped to the relocated control console. Ryke glanced up one final time, his finger poised over the button, and seemed to want to say something. For Cat, it was the first and last time she’d known the chatty frontiersman to be at a loss for words.
••••
The jump happened in a jarring, disorienting flash. The cargo bay and her friends winked out of existence, and Cat popped out of hyperspace one meter above and two meters to the side of Molly’s hyperspace trace. The idea had been to follow her, but not precisely. With the modified hyperdrive they were using, two dangers were to be avoided: one risk was arriving in the middle of something solid; the other was the risk of arriving in the middle of Molly. To minimize both, Cat arrived higher than Molly’s head and in as tight a ball as she could manage.